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ory of reality than the waking world. For example, with regard to latent and manifest dream content, Freud differentiates, then compares and contrasts, these concepts, with a view toward interpreting the latent content of apparently straightforward but plainly surreal (or anyway not-real) manifest dream content (Freud 218). As the term implies, manifest content means more or less what happens in a dream. Manifest content may be painful or traumatic, but for Freud, it does not follow that the painful dream "means" straightforwardly what it says. If that were the case, the process of dream distortion (images or events in a dream that conceal or stand for hidden meanings that can be interpreted) would be meaningless, and that concept is essential to Freud's assertion that all dreams articulate wish fulfillment. It remains for the interpreter of the dream to decode in the manifest dream content the dream distortion and allocate significance and latent logic to that content. As Freud puts it, dream interpretation is meant to "detect a latent dream content whose significance far surpasses that of the manifest dream-content" (Freud 238). This comes down to a method of understanding that symbolism is relevant to human experience and a method of understanding the reality of the mind and of the intersection of the mind with its cosmos. Even dreams of the death of a loved one, Freud explains, may be in instance of wish-fulfillment, with the wish being the dreamer's indifference over the loss of the loved one or the satisfaction that the deceased need never know of the dreamer's faults and failures (Freud 412-13). Now this may cause a guilty ambivalence, although Freud takes the view that even the most disturbing wish-fulfillment is not a moral judgment but a description of how human consciousness functions. In any case, "the wish manifested in the dream must be an infantile wish" (500), not subject to the censorship of morality or society.

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